Edit2: We're unimpressed that we couldn't answer all of your questions in time! We're planning another with our science team eventually. It's like herding cats working 24.5 hours a day. ;) So long, and thanks for all the karma!

We're a group of engineers from landing night, plus team members (scientists and engineers) working on surface operations.
Here's the list of participants:

The Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer (LIBS) instrument uses powerful laser pulses, focused on a small spot on target rock and soil samples within 7 m of the rover, to ablate atoms and ions in electronically excited states from which they decay, producing light-emitting plasma. The power density needed for LIBS is > 10 MW/mm2, which is produced on a spot in the range of 0.3 to 0.6 mm diameter using focused, ~14 mJ laser pulses of 5 nanoseconds duration.

During the first few months of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, the operations team worked out of a hotel somewhere with blackout curtains on the windows. They all had specially designed watches set to a martian sol.

The biggest challenge, according to the Prof. Steve Squyres (PI of the project), was trying to explain the concept to the hotel maids. The hotel maids kept barging in on as they were sleeping through the "martian" night.

@ Brian Schratz - you still have my linear algebra book from like 8 years ago, I'm assuming this mission would have been largely unsuccessful if you never learned linear algebra so I'm taking some of the credit for it.

Nice job though, I thought I recognized you when I was watching the stream.

Well this is awkward. Now that you mention it, it's very likely that I do. I'm sure I still have it somewhere around here if you want it back. Indeed, some of the credit goes to you. Sorry about that. :(

Seriously a linear algebra book signed byt he curisoty team would look great in a display case, or you know, on top of a charity auction pedestal. I would pay a lot to have such a thing :D #multiplenerdthemes

Do you consider that earth-born bacteria could survive on Curiosity and then spread on Mars? Was it ever considered to take bacteria or other life and see if it could survive in the soil/environment (even if isolated within Curiosity)? You guys rock!

We take great care to not take Earth-borne microbes to other planets. We don't want to go looking for building blocks of life only to find we brought it with us. This is why we work in a clean room wearing full-body "bunny suits" while assembling and testing the rover, and that all parts of the spacecraft are cleaned before launch. Those that can be baked are baked; others are swabbed with cleaning solution. For more details on planetary protection, see this site: http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/ - SLS

What degree of statistical certainty do you have that you were comprehensive in removing Earth-based life forms from the spacecraft / rover? I.E. is there any chance that some microbes were missed during cleaning? Or was this not calculated / discussed.

Since no one seems to have really answered this question (as far as I see), here is my understanding (I did an internship in astrobiology working with bacterial spores and their uses in determining the effectiveness of sterilization treatments): Yes, there is a chance that the spacecraft is not 100% sterile (although less likely for the rover itself because it does not actually have contact with the atmosphere). Contamination is always an issue, and if they were to find evidence of life on Mars, I am sure their first question would be "is this contamination?" Especially with the older missions, before PP was as well developed as it is now, there could be a few bacterial spores that were carried to Mars. I believe that the general idea is, if you can show that there is below a specified, very very low density of spores on the spacecraft, the remainder will be killed in the extreme vacuum/radiation/temperature environments in space. But no, it is probably not perfect, but it was most certainly discussed by the engineers/scientists!

These devices are considered very reliable and are used on many spacecraft (NASA and commercial). Curiosity did have a lot of devices, but there was also a lot of redundancy built into the firing system. Many of the devices used on Curiosity had been used successfully on Sprit and Opportunity and Pathfinder, so there was a lot of previous experience here at JPL.

Not all of the pyros were for EDL - we actually had to fire off a set several hours after landing to deploy some of our surface hardware.

Testing the pyro system was a pretty big task - if any of them had been mismapped it could have been a bad day for the mission. Getting the timing right was also a challenging task for the EDL team. So in addition to the reliability of the device itself, we had to make sure we were firing the right device at the right time.

Actually, that's not exactly true. The MAHLI instrument has white and UV LEDs on it, so it can take a picture at night (if power and thermal constraints allow), although it would have to be positioned close to a rock.

It's constantly charging, but the nuclear battery only produces about 100 watts. Since it doesn't have lights (would take too much energy and weight) it uses the night time to store up energy to use during the day when it can see.

Jebediah was my favorite. He lived through my first 20 launches (I was very careful about safety). Then I got too ambitious: I attempted a Mun landing. Long story short, a decoupler failed during the landing impact and Jeb exploded.

Orbiter is awesome. Nothing gives me more excitement in a videogame than landing with Apollo 11 on the surface of the moon. Or performing a rendezvous with the ISS. In Orbiter the space shuttle is still alive!

The length of the mission is currently set for 23 months to achieve mission success, but it could be extended just like the Mars Exploration Rovers. They had a prime mission of 90 days but Opportunity is still operating over 8 years later. -VM

I know this is a bit off topic, but keeping with the theme of longevity, how long can Opportunity keep operating? A couple more years or can we expect its last images to be human explorers picking it up?

A couple more years or can we expect its last images to be human explorers picking it up?

I always like to think about Spirit and Opportunity sitting in a Martian Museum in couple of hundreds of years and little kids seeing them behind glass walls on Mars. It would be a nice end to that sad XKCD comic.

This isn't too far-fetched! Astronauts from Apollo 12 brought back a camera from the robotic Surveyor 3 lunar lander, which is now in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Let's hope we can bring some pieces of Spirit and Opportunity back home for everyone to see!

To be fair, weight and room are very real considerations when you're traveling in space. Assuming we overcame all the technical hurdles required to send either a person or a robot to retrieve something from Mars, it would be highly impractical to have the requisite space/fuel/equipment to pack up the entire thing and bring it home.

I like to imagine that in a 100 years or so, after mars is colonized, the rovers will be on display in a "early settler" museum on mars. Teachers will take students, and they'll complain about how they don't care about some stupid old robots.

I do think its a sad XKCD, especially the frames along the lines of "A good rover like they wanted." But I find it exciting that we've had rovers on Mars long enough for them to have outlived their operational life!

In your opinion, is the sky crane an efficient method of payload delivery on Mars, or are there better ideas being invented that are more economically and environmentally benign than the sky crane?

How much unspent fuel was on board when the sky crane crash-landed?

This isn't a question, but I also want to mention how impressed I am about the amount of publicity Curiosity has generated, and how well publicized its landing was. I think the key to increasing NASA's funding is through public education about the missions and experiments NASA performs. Among other things, the general public needs to be interested and involved in space exploration for NASA to be successful.

Thank you for your assistance in such a wonderful accomplishment for the human species!

The Sky Crane is a really good way to land and accommodate varied terrain. It's not a question of efficiency - although it seems really complicated, it actually illuminates a lot of problems with previous landers like having to get out/off of the lander or having the engines operating really close to the ground.

There were over 100kg of hydrazine still remaining - this is because we designed the Curiosity mission to be able to land a lot of different places and let the scientists decide where to go. So the final landing site wasn't chosen until after the spacecraft had already shipped to the launch site!

Because the impact of the wreckage could have uncovered something the rover was incapable of.

Just daydreaming, I'm thinking of another mission like this with a specially designed skycrane that would crash & explode or carry a bomb or something to get deeper samples. Maybe even shoot a bomb at Mars & have it tailed by a lander, touching down in a fresh crater.

They've said in the livestreams that they actually want to avoid it, as the fuel could contaminate their science instruments. The descent stage (top part of the sky crane) was actually ordered to crash away from the science objectives of the expedition.

I don't know, that's a hard call. From my perspective. the Data character, and Mr. Spiner's portrayal of said character, has inspired many a mind to think on a higher level about what life means and the future of humanity and technology. That is, in and of itself, a great honor.

There's just no need for a sense of competition when we are talking such greats, on both accounts.

You are right that the processor does feel acient. Our current smarthphones are more powerful. The reasoning for this is three-fold. First of all, the computer was selected about 8 years ago, so we have the latest and greated space certified parts that existed then. Second of all, it was the most rubost and proven space grade processor at that time. Thirdly, in order to make a processor radiation hardened it requires lots of tricks on the silicon that is not conducive to making it fast. Given that, it does not run any GUIs and can just focus on raw programming, and actually gets a lot done. All of the programming is done in C, and our toolchain is very similar to programming on any platform.

You have no idea of how intense my rig is, sir. Heat from my water cooling system is used to power thousands of homes. I left it on overnight once and it got bored... want to know the last number of Pi? It is 4.

We often forget how many things we take for granted on Earth that they have to take into account. Like when people ask what the surface of Mars sounds like, forgetting that the atmosphere is so thin that there's very little for the sound to travel through.

Most, if not all military equipment uses the same kind of "dated" technology. Equipment must be completely solid and foolproof so that on the battlefield, it will perform at its maximum potential every time.

Congratulations on landing the rover! I just have one question -- are there any plans for taking pictures of the night sky as seen from Mars? If not, why not? I know it won't be very different from our own view, but it would still be interesting to see.

Yes! We actually took a lot of pictures of the night sky with MER (this is my field of research, actually). We're planning on continuing thee observations with Curiosity once we've checked out all our instruments and are ready to do our nominal science mission.

Yes, Curiosity has a few ways to communicate with Earth. She can communicate directly with Earth with an X-band link. Through the high gain antenna, which we can point directly at Earth, we can achieve ~10 kbps from Mars to Earth. Most of our data is returned through the UHF relay links with MRO and ODY. Currently MSL can top out at 2 megabits/second to MRO, but that is only at specific conditions.

We are designed to return ~250 megabits per sol (~31 megabytes). Some days are better than this, while others are worse. It depends on the range and angles between MSL and the orbiters. But so far data return has been excellent!
--bcs

Every science hypothesis is vetted among the team, and we would want to make sure we were absolutely certain it was life/fossils/etc. before releasing it to the public. But we absolutely would release this information, once we had sufficient evidence and it was agreed upon among the science teams! We follow this procedure for all of our interesting finds.

President Obama was speaking to the team in a televised phone interview. During the interview he said, "Guys, if you find any martians be sure to give me a call. At the moment, I'm pretty busy with other things - but this would be bumped to the top of the list."

Getting into into the ocean is one tricky part. I think some folks have done some experiments with ROV's that melt their way down through ice, but we've got some work to do. Jupiter also has a pretty challenging radiation environment and we'll have to come up with some way to relay information from the Earth to the ROV. None of these issues seems to be insurmountable. smc